Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 16 of 40

The Site 14 Enquiry

It came through Pradhan, which is why it came at all.

Pradhan had done the structure on the commercial job and had done four others over the years and had never once introduced Jagdish to anybody he would not have introduced to his own brother. He telephoned in the first week of February 2005 and said there was a man who wanted twenty minutes, and that it was land, and that he had said he would ask and nothing more than ask.

The man was called Ghaisas and he was perhaps sixty and he came to the office above the bank on a Thursday and drank one cup of tea and did not sit back in the chair at any point in twenty-five minutes.

“You know the plot,” he said.

“I know the plot.”

“Then I’ll not describe it to you.”

“Thank you.”

Ghaisas put a folder on the desk and did not open it, which Jagdish noted and respected.

“The position is different from ninety-one,” Ghaisas said. “That is the only reason I am here. I would not come and offer you the same thing twice; a man who does that is telling you he thinks you have got poorer.”

“What’s different?”

“The case is decided. Two thousand and one. It went the way everybody expected and it took ten years to do it.” He tipped his head. “The far bank is cleared. The godown went in ninety-nine. The families that worked it were resettled by the party that took the godown land, and that was done properly, and I can show you the paper on it, and I have brought it.”

“And the drainage.”

“The drainage is now the corporation’s and it is on the new alignment and it does not go anywhere near.” Ghaisas finally sat back. “Wagh saheb, I am not selling you a fight. I am telling you that the thing you objected to in ninety-one is finished. It has been finished for four years. And the plot is still sitting, because a plot that a good builder walked away from is a plot everybody in this district treats like a snake, and that is not a valuation, that is a superstition, and I am too old to be superstitious and so are you.”

It was, Jagdish thought, one of the best presentations of a plot he had ever been given. There was no pressure in it anywhere. Ghaisas had come with the resettlement paper and had not opened the folder because he had not yet been asked a question that required it.

“What’s the number?”

Ghaisas told him.

It was, allowing for fourteen years, roughly what it had been in 1991, in a district where everything else had gone up by a multiple.

Jagdish refused it in four minutes and he did it badly.

He said that he had three live sites and a redevelopment in its last year and no capacity, which was true and was not the reason. He said that his capital was committed, which was true and was not the reason. He said that Ghaisas should take it to Kambli’s people or to the Thane group who had money that year, and Ghaisas said he would, and did, and they did not take it either.

And then, at the door, Ghaisas — who was not a fool and who had been reading builders’ faces since before Jagdish qualified — said:

“You didn’t ask to see the resettlement paper.”

“No.”

“It’s a good paper. It’s the thing you would want to see.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Ghaisas looked at him for a moment with something that was not quite pity.

“Then it wasn’t the fishermen,” he said, and went down the stairs.

He did not tell Meera.

This is the fact of the chapter and everything else in it is arrangement. He did not tell her that evening, or that week, or that year, and she found out in 2008 from a third party in a way that will be described when it happens.

It is worth setting out what a small thing it would have been to tell her.

There was no decision to conceal. He had refused it; there was nothing to argue about; a refusal does not require a wife’s agreement and Meera had never once in twenty years demanded to be consulted on a plot. It would have been a sentence at dinner. Ghaisas came about the creek plot. I said no. Nine words. She would have said something short and mildly interested and that would have been the end of it, and she would have known.

He had told her about the first refusal in 1991. He had told her that night, at length, badly, in a state, at the kitchen table, and she had listened to the whole of it and had said one sentence at the end of it that he had never forgotten and that this book will not be reproducing here, because it belongs to that night.

That was the difference and he could feel the difference and he could not have named it. In 1991 telling her had been part of the refusing. In 2005 the refusing was complete before Ghaisas reached the bottom of the stairs, and the telling would have been a separate act, performed afterwards, for no operational purpose, about a subject he did not want to be in the room with.

So: no capacity, no capital, three sites and a redevelopment. All true. All said to a man in an office. None of it said in the flat.

He thought about the resettlement paper twice that spring and both times pushed it away with a speed that ought to have told him something.

Because Ghaisas was right at the door, and Jagdish knew he was right, and had known before Ghaisas said it. A man who refuses a plot in 1991 because of eleven households on the far bank is a man who, offered the same plot in 2005, asks to see what happened to the eleven households. He asks first. He asks before the number. He would not be able to stop himself asking; the asking would be involuntary; the asking would be the proof of the thing everybody in that district had believed about him for fourteen years, including, most of the time, himself.

He had not asked.

And there is a reading of that failure which is entirely creditable — that the plot was genuinely impossible in February 2005 for reasons of capital, and that a busy man does not interrogate the provenance of an offer he is about to decline, and that asking to see the paper would have been discourteous, an invitation to a conversation he was closing.

Jagdish held that reading. He held it for three years and he was never quite able to put it down and never quite able to sit on it either.

The other reading is available to the reader on exactly the same facts and this book is not going to choose between them. It will only record that in the whole of 2005, in a year in which he refused, unprompted and at no gain to himself, a plot he could have taken, the single thing Jagdish Wagh did about Site 14 that he was ashamed of was not asking a question, and that he knew it by the time the man reached the street.